To the editor:

Your July issue contains an extraordinarily flawed review of a book that attempts to rehabilitate the scientific reputation of Peter Duesberg. The latter asserts that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. This is comparable to Lysenko convincing Stalin that acquired characteristics are inherited, which ruined a whole generation of Soviet agricultural science. Duesberg's theory of the noninfectious nature of HIV apparently convinced President Mbeki of South Africa, causing the loss of thousands and perhaps ultimately millions of lives.

In a paper in the Journal of Bioscience1, Duesberg provides a full compilation of his fallacies:

1. He claims AIDS is not contagious. Answer: It is clearly sexually transmitted from man to woman, from woman to man, from man to man and from contaminated needles. It is also transmitted from mothers to babies through mother's milk. It fills all of the requirements of Koch's postulates for infectious agents.

2. He asks why there is no HIV in most AIDS patients? Answer: AIDS patients effectively treated with combinations of anti-HIV drugs can have HIV levels drop to below detectable levels, but levels always return to pretreatment levels when treatment is discontinued.

3. He asks why HIV would take 10 years from infection to AIDS? Answer: Because the tug of war between the virus and the immune system takes that long to be lost. The great menace of HIV is that it takes so long to kill that it provides catastrophic opportunities for the spread of disease. Epidemics like Ebola burn themselves out because they kill so quickly.

4. He says that AIDS is a chemical epidemic caused by anti-HIV drugs. Answer: How did the AIDS problem proliferate in the United States in the 1980s before there were any anti-HIV drugs? And how did millions of HIV cases develop in sub-Saharan Africa before there were any HIV drugs in those areas?

One could go on and on in refuting Duesberg's misstatements about HIV, but there is no point. I will leave it to others to refute his claims about aneuploidy and cancer. I conclude by wondering how Nature Biotechnology found such a credulous reviewer as Miklos.